Geographic North proudly presents Don't Look Now, our second frightening foray into Halloween-inspired sounds to delight and dismay throughout the season. Featuring 90 minutes of haunted, hellish hysteria composed by some of the most abominable names in ambient music, the compilation nearly splits at the seams with grotesque grace.

All proceeds from this morbid mirth go directly toward youthSpark, an Atlanta-based non-profit that works directly with, and protects, at-risk youth from exploitation, abuse and trafficking in the Southeastern United States.

The compilation opens with "The Visitor," a peculiar prologue that portends potential peril ahead and one of two bookends concocted by Arp, who serves as the compilation's crypt-keeper of sorts. As the fog begins to swell, Ka Baird’s "Clearing" brings a trickle of overcast textures and exquisitely disorienting organ tones. Algiers shatter into the scene with brooding vehemence, sounding like a biting mix of John Carpenter and the Pop Group. Perennial witching hour heroes Anjou bring a moonlit mantra of eroding melodies that blossom with decay. "Sada," composed and performed by Clarice Jensen, steers the action deep into the underworld, projecting an inverted soundscape of smeared beauty. Western six-string virtuoso Danny Paul Grody carries the bizarre bewilderment into an open den of shimmering, pristine melody and resonance. The first main passage is nailed shut by "Cement Dossier," one of three anonymous and obscene chapter breaks from the Geographic North house band.

Next up, Christina Vantzou and John Also Bennett unfurl a hypnotic hymn of rustic kosmische bliss that balances a deathly mix of paranoia and resolution. Eluvium's "Surrounded by Illusion" is a mini-epic of textural maximalism that only confirms the Pacific NW ambient godhead's emotional prowess. Jefre Cantu-Ledesma summons the ghost of Hildegard von Bingen for an organ-filled interpretation of "O virtus sapientiae" that's both life-affirming and devastating.

Robert Donne (Labradford, Anjou) crafts a pummeling waltz of soot and emaciation with "Rakkauslaulu," a stinging salute to Mika Vainio. Ilyas Ahmed offers an ice-cold hand to lead you through the ornately crumbing decay of "Local Blues," blurring itself almost too perfectly into the eerie, almost too comforting calmness of Félicia Atkinson’s "Little Things." Richard Chartier assumes his Pinkcourtesyphone guise for a purely cinematic lapse into the netherworld. The incognito amusement continues with "Stabbing," an extended, slow-motion scene that brings some of Suzanne Kraft’' most volatile and vile work to date.

"Thunderhead," a menacingly paced slow burn from Moon Diagrams (Moses Archuleta of Deerhunter), could be the soundtrack to the most alluring haunted house you’ve ever seen, while Roberto Carlos Lange's "Indian Rope" casts a curiously charming spell of glitter and gloom. Vancouver's own Secret Pyramid crafts a bewitching bereavement from the North, permeating everything it touches with bedeviled beauty for an unforgettable climax of bleak allure. Arp returns again to bookend Don't Look Now with "Love Theme," a fitting epilogue that reflects on the receding haze with hopeful optimism.

Although the sun has finally rose, plenty of shadows remain.

More information can be found here.

Los Angeles-based DJ and composer Nick Malkin is perhaps best known for his noirish, backlit ambient dance music under the name Afterhours (Not Not Fun). Malkin's also moonlighted as a casual collaborator with LA Vampires and Sun Araw, served as an early DJ with Chinatown-based experimental radio station KCHUNG, and currently hosts a radio show of atmospheric selections on NTS radio called Post-Geography. Now, Malkin returns with Slow Day on Brilliant Drive, his most radiant work to date.

Along with Maxwell Sterling (double bass) and Jon-Kyle Mohr (percussion), Malkin self-instituted an intricate form of collaboration that required extensive amounts of improvisation, meditation, and editing. Malkin introduced a curated series of loops to his collaborators, who then embellished them with textures and muted motifs. Malkin then laid everything out and went to work scouring, polishing, and re-contextualizing certain elements into something entirely new, with elements within dating back to 2014.

The end result is a profound live-band ambient record that celebrates a curated but communal musical dynamic, along the lines of The Necks or Supersilent, but heavily informed by the micro-delicacy of Mille Plateaux’s most fathomless works. Even with the highly disparate sound sources, Slow Day on Brilliant Drive is a deeply cohesive and surprisingly intimate work that speaks to Malkin's uncanny ear and devotion to a concept.

More information can be found here.

An album/artbook documenting Sean McCann’s recent chamber compositions. Ranging from the 10-person ensemble performance of "Portraits of Friars" at Fylkingen, Stockholm in February 2018, to his first quartet piece "Victorian Wind"performed in Toronto in 2014. McCann’s scores leak pastoral and bizarre passages, dancing in the banal beauty of sound poetry. The performances feature guest musicians Sarah Davachi, Zachary Paul, Geneva Skeen, Celia Eydeland, Maxwell August Croy and more.

The book holds in-depth scores, program notes, and photography by McCann.  A lovely compliment to finger through while you lay down to listen to the disc.  It holds text and imagery from the pieces, along with musical notation.

The notes for "Pistons" follow here:

I assembled this piece while wanting to make my life of leisure and gluttony in London somehow artistic. I was in London for a week or ten days in October 2017 for a business trip. I love London. I love doing two things at a time or more. So it worked out.I find I have a hard time enjoying anything unless I am multitasking. For example right now as I type this description I am also drinking old coffee with ice-cubes in it, exporting a master from Pro-Tools downstairs, and watching Friday the 13th: A New Beginning on the television set.

So in this British multitasking I decided to work on a piece of music while indulging in food and drink roaming around London. I was also reading Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal during these outings (talk about sentimental). Some elements of those poems crept their way, drawn out of order, into Celia’s singing text.

As with all my compositions to this point, they are left open to interpretation – no real meaning, just flickers of settings and emotions.

The taste of everything below (the score) spawned thoughts of colors and elements and people and emotions, though with the text I decided to keep it simply about the food and the beverages. The romantic music and singing is the rendering of the emotions I felt, while my banal reading was the actual act of consumption. I recorded the text while lying down in my childhood bedroom in Goleta, California. Half asleep just trying to get it over with. A fitting situation for the piece: forced beauty.

"I had the great pleasure to perform on two of the pieces within this unique collection of Sean’s work.  What I admire most about Sean’s process is his ability to synthesize various prosaic experiences of day-to-day life so delicately and so beautifully within numerous contexts – music, speech, sound, text, visual imagery, and physical space.  Although these four works each offer a particular frame to an indefinite moment, they are united in my mind by a sort of latent simplicity.  Their classical orientation is unconventional – it is not the pastoral mechanism at work here per se, but rather the lingering aftertaste of a place and a time, unfolding in a decidedly visceral manner.  Hearing these works again in their recorded format, I am reminded of the deliberate hand behind the composition, and the careful pacing and placement of the musical experience here, both as it manifests in the player’s awareness and as it is quietly subsumed into the elegant folds of the collective whole."         -Sarah Davachi

More information can be found here.

Distant Animals is the artistic output of Daniel Alexander Hignell, a researcher and sound, video and performance artist from South East England. Hignell has developed a practice indebted to political and participatory resonance of creative acts, interrogating notions of autonomy, collaboration, and the tension between sense (what is perceived by the senses) and sense (what is made sensible by the community). He has recorded, written, performed and researched numerous socially-oriented sound works across Europe, often choosing to work with a diverse range of collaborators, including visual artists, choreographers, theologians, lawyers, and political activists.

In 2017 he completed an AHRC-funded doctorate in composition exploring the social function of art-making, of which Lines constitutes the first of several sonic responses. Inspired by a 130-page text-score, and performed upon a modular synthesizer, the work explores participatory approaches to performance, utilizing text that leads its performer to undertake emergent and evolutionary changes in timbre and rhythm over extended time periods.

Drawing upon the works of La Monte Young, Morton Feldman, Eleh, and Mauricio Kagel, the album employs a highly conceptual approach to its genre, incorporating the notion of the drone as both a compositional method, a spiritual approach, and a participatory tool for engaging its audience. Although ostensibly a musical work, the movements and relations the score invokes are designed so as to be applicable to any context - mowing the lawn, fixing the sink, having an argument, or even going for a walk. It is from this diversity that the musical content is born – as the work is constructed via site-specific interpretations of the scores core text, passages are invoked not to arrive at a specific musical point, but as a means of a more general rumination, an engagement with the works ecological context that encourages slow, emergent phrases that unfold over time.

With this open-ended approach to composition, Lines relies on conceptually rich sonic phrases, exploring over its length both the purity of a musical tapestry that amounts to little more than a complexly modulated square wave - often pushing the filters that shape it to near breaking-point - and the rhythmic dissonance of the voice, noise, and distorted bells that erupt violently from it as the work progresses.

The album contains a pack of 4 postcards, documenting a land-art intervention undertaken during the creation of the score. Included in each pack is an individually hand-stamped and numbered print, created by inclusive artist Layla Tully, and responding to the album's central theme - materiality, substance, emergence, and the process of 'line-making.'

More information can be found here.

This Is Where is the collaborative project of Algis Kizys, Norman Westberg and Lynn Wright. Having previously released a limited edition cassette tape in 2016 under the name of ALN, their self-titled album for Hallow Ground is to be considered the three-piece's definite studio debut as This Is Where.

Recorded and mixed by Kizys, This Is Where delves even deeper into the psychedelic and at times cosmic drone sound previously to be heard in the New York City-based trio's live recordings.  As a logical next step after what the Swans guitarist Westberg has presented on recent solo albums like The All Most Quiet for Hallow Ground, it integrates three distinct musical visions into a whirling ocean of sound.

This Is Where's sound is neither dominated by the thundering brutalism of Swans - where also Kizys took over bass duties for a while - nor the gloomy Doom Pop of Wright's Bee and Flower. Instead Kizys, Westberg and Wright use delay, reverb and effects to weave a pulsating web of sonic textures, moving effortlessly from dark depths to almost jubilant high notes. With Kizy's roaring bass guitar as a sonic backdrop, Westberg and Wright give rise to a musical dialogue marked by density and tension.

Over the course of 40 minutes, This Is Where create a mesmerizing musical experience, divided into four discrete movements. This Is Where is a blissful journey through space, time and most of all a yet unheard-of approach to guitar-driven drone and ambient music.

More information can be found here.

Since 2016 we’ve been blessed with Mike Cooper in our catalog. The first installment was New Kiribati, revisiting a self-released 1999 CDR in which Mike Cooper was experimenting with a lap steel, electronics, prepared guitar and live recordings, creating what he called “Ambient Exotica Soundscapes”. In the following year, Reluctant Swimmer showed an enigmatic, exotic and elegant adventure into Mike's 1920s National tri-plate lap steel guitar and his Vietnamese electric lap steel. Two pieces, two sides, each ending with beautiful interpretations of some Mike’s favorite songs, "Movies Is Magic" by Van Dyke Parks and Fred Neil's "Dolphins."

2018 and it's time for some new discoveries into Mike Cooper's limitless exploration in his collection of guitars. The title itself, "Tropical Gothic” references Cooper's beloved areas of 'the South' with a Gothic, dark, remote interplay... Tropical Gothic includes, but is by no means limited to, a reflection on a region where European colonial powers fought intensively against indigenous populations and against each other for control of land and resources.’

In each side Mike Cooper studies different approaches to his method of uniting guitar and field recordings into a constant stream of sound, where he delivers chaos and melody – not necessarily in that order. Side A is composed of shorter pieces. Each of them offers a myriad of images and sensations, between the enigmatic and terror ("The Pit"), joy, happiness and freedom ("Running Naked") or pure contemplation ("Onibaba").

"Onibaba" runs as a fitting introduction to Side B and its 18-minute magical piece "Lelong & Gods Of Bali." A mix of ambient exotica music, silent film soundtrack and distorted rhythms that dance around Mike's guitar. It keeps reinventing and transforming itself throughout those eighteen minutes, summing up the dexterity and muscle of Mike Cooper's music of the last two decades.

More information can be found here.

For over half a decade, William Basinski and Lawrence English have been in regular contact with one another. During that time their paths have crossed repeatedly in various cities; Zagreb, Los Angeles, Hobart and more, in a variety situations. It was from these chance encounters – and the strange familiar of lives lived in transit – that their first collaboration, Selva Oscura, was seeded.

The phrase Selva Oscura draws its root from Dante’s Inferno. Literally translated as "twilight forest," it metaphorically speaks to both those who find themselves on the unfamiliar path and more explicitly the nature of losing one's way in place and time.

Each of the extended pieces on this record maps an acoustic topography that draws on the concept of drifting into the strange familiar. The works each dwell in an ever shifting, yet fundamentally constant state of unfolding. As one sound fades away, another is revealed in its place, creating a sense of an eternal reveal.

Selva Oscura was recorded in Brisbane and Los Angeles simultaneously. The compositions were each created through a process of iteration and rearrangement that inverted the micro and macro characteristics of the raw sonic materials. Dynamics and density were chiseled with restraint and at other times intensely reductionist approaches to create a limitlessly deep, but open sound field – as rich as the suggested place from which its title is drawn.

Selva Oscura is dedicated to Paul Clipson, a close friend of both William and Lawrence, and whose work celebrated the wonder that is becoming lost in experiences that lie in excess of our everyday understandings.

More information can be found here.

Here's the warts n' all lo-fi CD-R demo era that in 2001 (!) laid the blueprint for Skygreen's ongoing non-career. Recorded fast & often improvised, these are sincere attempts by crude musicians in love with the TVP's, ESP-Disk, tambourines & Kenneth Patchen drawings.

Hope you can find something to enjoy in it.

The Skygreen Leopards Love You etc etc

tracks 1-20 are on the LP, 21-24 are digital bonus tracks

credits

most everything by Donovan Quinn & Glenn Donaldson

Jennifer Modenessi sang on some songs too.

recorded 2001 in San Francisco on Tascam 388 on Radio Shack brand 1/4" reels.

mastered by Sean McCann

More information can be found here.

Re-Verbed (No-Input Mixing Board 9) is the latest edition from Tokyo based artist Toshimaru Nakamura.

The No-Input Mixing Board is a unique instrument pioneered by Nakamura. As its name suggests, it is a mixing console within which external no input exists. The instrument is fueled only by its own feedback. Initially used by Nakamura as a more tonal instrument, creating incredibly high frequency outputs, over time the mixing board has become decided more rhythmic and harmonic. It is this sonic territory that is the focus of this edition.

Re-Verbed (No-Input Mixing Board 9) is by far one of Nakamura's most musical recordings. The board’s tonality is front and center; low pulses and cavernous pulses fizzle and murmur with a subtle but frenetic energy. Drifting into decidedly dub oriented directions, Nakamura allows the instrument to breathe; specifically he finds new dimensions to the ways interference can be brought into harmony within the pieces. While the instrument might suggest a sense of indeterminacy, Nakamura’s intimate relationship with it means he can maintain an unerring sense of control over it.

Re-Verbed (No-Input Mixing Board 9) is evidence of his intense capacity to create profound work with this most unusual of devices. A conjuring of something truly unique from literally nothing.

More information can be found here.

This Mortal Coil Reissues

Deluxe LP & CD Reissues Released 26th October PRE-ORDER FROM 4AD here

This Mortal Coil was the given name of a strictly-studio project conceived and produced by 4AD founder Ivo Watts-Russell that spawned three albums - It'll End In Tears (1984), Filigree & Shadow (1986), Blood (1991).

Over the span of eight years he, along with Blackwing Studios house engineer/ co-producer, John Fryer, and a rotating cast of musicians, created original works, musical links and reinterpretations of impeccably curated songs; introducing a new audience to the talents of a previous generation including Big Star, Tim Buckley, Roy Harper, Spirit, Gene Clark, Dino Valenti, Rain Parade, Emmylou Harris, Syd Barrett and Colin Newman, amongst others.

The new deluxe vinyl versions differ from the original releases with each album having had its artwork reimagined by Ivo Watts-Russell and Vaughan Oliver (4AD’s long-time visual partner).  All three are now presented in beautiful, hand finished and high-gloss gatefold sleeves, using remastered audio made from the original analogue studio tapes by the late, great John Dent.

The deluxe CD editions are being manufactured by the Ichikudo company in Japan, coming packaged in striking gatefold paper sleeves which are printed to the highest standard. Originally made available as part of a highly limited boxset back in 2011, these new versions differ by being UHQCDs (Ultimate High Quality Compact Disc) rather than HDCDs (High Definition Compatible Digital).

∞ You can pre-order via 4AD here ∞

You can watch an album trailer below, and find all further details on the releases here.

For this third release on Dais, Drew McDowall reaches into concept, ritual, and immersion, in an exercise of unravelling the DNA of hallucination. The Third Helix is McDowall’s product of deconstructive exploration, twisting the fibers of being into new structure, shape, pattern, and pulse, without reconstituting its inscribed template.

The result is a true "third act," in McDowall’s career, that has seen him peregrinate from the late-’70s art-punk of the trio Poems to his work with Psychic TV and Coil throughout the '80s and '90s, into his current home of New York City, where he has composed with CSD, Compound Eye, as well his solo work. That triangulation is central to The Third Helix, as it begins with his dive into the existence of a sensory toolkit unique to McDowall before twisting faculties and reconfiguring consciousness by honoring inherent power, cognizant of memory yet agnostic of context.

With the tenet that journey is rarely linear, but rather an omnipresent oscillation of matter, sound is stripped to salient and primal, propelled by McDowall’s boring into the core of memory and impulse, suturing together the silent awareness of excogitating experience.

Featuring eight new tracks of McDowall’s dark, experimental electronics, including the opener "Rhizome," The Third Helix is a churning descent into emotion, provoking thought and reflection while carving out haunting space only to fill it with baffling and wondrous structures of layered sound. McDowall solidifies himself as an architect who transforms otherworldly materials into something fascinating and challenging in the process.

Unnerving, trancelike anthems for nervous meditation and anxious relaxation. Fans of Coil will immediately connect and immerse, while the complex compositions are a welcome listen for drone and ambient enthusiasts.

The Third Helix is released September 21, 2018 on digital and standard black vinyl LP, as well as limited edition clear vinyl (100 copies), translucent red vinyl (400 copies) and translucent amber (500 copies). Packaged within a thick sturdy matte sleeve jacket featuring artwork/design by artist J.S. Aurelius (Ascetic House/Marshstepper).

More information can be found here.

Charalambides founders Tom & Christina Carter follow a vision of iconoclastic music as transformative force. Touching on the outer limits of acid folk, psych rock, and improvisation, their sound remains uniquely personal & consistent. Since 1991, Charalambides has released many recordings on labels like Siltbreeze, Kranky & Wholly Other.

Despite Tom and Christina Carter's prolific solo careers and numerous other projects, Charalambides has existed in an unbroken trajectory for over two-and-a-half decades, outlasting the genres that critics and other yardstick-makers have tried to cram them into. Their recent performances and recordings retain the directness and delicate menace that mark their early releases, even as they explore an interlocking musical telepathy honed by years of artistic collaboration.

Aptly tilted Charalambides: Tom and Christina Carter, the newest album from Charalambides furthers the duo's deep psychic understanding of music. Laid down in two sessions with no overdubs, the album entwines their best known approaches into a raw, fragile, wordless and hypnotic whole. It's definitely the duo at their most exquisite.

More information can be found here.

UNIVERSAL EYES is the culmination of UNIVERSAL INDIANS and WOLF EYES. UNIVERSAL INDIANS started in Lansing Michigan in the early shadows of the '90s, with Gretchen Gonzales (now Gonzales Davidson), Bryan Ramirez, & Johnny “Inzane” Olson. The trio started as a Jesse Harper cover band and managed to play every single basement that had a power outlet in the tri-county area. After moving to the Detroit area in the late 90’s, Rammer was replaced by Aaron Dilloway, who along with Nathan Young were already in the throes of primitive electronic global domination that is WOLF EYES. The collective quartet played every art space, record store, and club in the Detroit area and together coined the Michigan Progressive Underground audio sprawl. Around the dawn of the 2000’s, Gretchen went full time with the moody & cold stylings of SLUMBER PARTY and after a wild Bowling Green Ohio gig, Olson joined WOLF EYES full time. After some drama that would make even Fleetwood Mac disappear into the shadows of suburbia and toss their EQ into a lonely fire, UNIVERSAL INDIANS appeared to have fate / faded into the packed history book pages of Michigan musical lore.

As age and time seem to dust over wounds while magically healing them, the quartet met again in the northern suburbs of Detroit on a brisk spring Sunday in 2018. They hauled modern and ancient instruments into a home studio and just like that: the dream / nightmare had hot blood pumping thru its’ duct-taped sound body once again, as if the missing years were nothing but a minute hurdle. The kings and queen of noise were reunited.

Four Variations On 'Artificial Society' is the nearly exact document of this unholy reunion captured in full detail by Warren Defever (HIS NAME IS ALIVE). The two record set will be on coke bottle clear and white vinyl presented by Trip Metal Limited label in partnership with Lower Floor, with record speeds to be determined by the listener. UNIVERSAL EYES has been born/reborn in proof that free spirits can always move forward and still be intoxicated by the horrid liquid that is ROCK & FRY. JOIN US.

More information can be found here.

Editions Mego is proud to present the first outing from the legendary English musician, songwriter, composer and producer Simon Fisher Turner alongside the highly acclaimed emerging Swedish sound artist Klara Lewis.

Care is a unique outing rife with delicious dichotomy. The opening track positions the aggressive directly against more fragile moments. On the subsequent track, medieval melodies sprout from a dense rhythmic hiss. Witness a Middle Eastern song appearing amongst a haunted rattling reverb in the epic "Tank" whilst a beautiful force of hope can be found within the sound world of the the closing track "Mend."

The wide scope of references and constant pull of forces make this debut offering a timeless patchwork of sonic spaces. Care is an album which sways in such a salubrious manner one can’t help but delight in its unique form of location/disorientation.

More information can be found here.

"Electro-acoustic maestro and noted mastering engineer Stephen Mathieu commits a decade of spellbinding work to Radiance, collecting 12 album length discs (total: almost 13 hours!) revolving around the concept of stasis, the unfolding of time and sustained frequencies, deep listening, and immersive soundscapes. We've barely touched the sides with this one but, boy, it's a compelling, deeply immersive ride...

Completing Mathieu’s most significant cycle of work in his twenty year oeuvre, Radiance operates in a push and pull of reflection and absorption, using heat and light as metaphors for the synaesthetic qualities of sound, and how it is perceived by the listener not just thru ears. The title itself also connotes a vast scale of timelessness, but also one prone to fade away, decay, and its from these polysemous readings that Mathieu draws a remarkable spectrum of interrelated yet variegated compositions.

As ever, Mathieu is effectively dealing with the metaphysics of sound, using an array of electronics and electronic processes to divine new life in old instruments and samples, getting right down to their grain and accentuating their normally imperceptible peculiarities and latent spirits. In a sense he’s tactfully highlighting the lustre of his sounds, brining out their unique qualities for the ear to feel.That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s all shiny and seductive. Rather, the pieces' textures range from blingy to coruscating and every integer in-between, sharing a feel for and fascination with the infidelity of acoustic, mechanical, and electronic sounds perhaps only comparable with the likes of previous collaborators, Akira Rabelais and the GRM’s Kassel Jaeger, or Leyland Kirby, for example, within the contemporary field.

All 12 albums in the set were individually a year or so in the making, and thusly require patient, committed listening for full comprehension The time we've spent with it so far is enlightening, rendering truly sublime passages and moments in the multi-timbral shimmer of "Sea Song I," and likewise in the tantalizing, prickly haze of "The Answer VII," while the longer pieces naturally give broader room for his ideas to grow, and beautifully so in the likes of his heavy-lidded and keening drone panorama "First Consort," while "To Have Elements Exist In Space (GRM Version)" patiently and exquisitely evokes a state of weightlessness, and, at its longest, the hour long breadth of "Feldman" operates with deeply uncanny, surface level tonal reflections, which, as glib as it may read, recalls to us the magick of looking out a bus window at night, where the internal reflections and external street lights create refractive, illusory dimensions to get totally lost in.

The slow gaze is key to this amazing suite, as it purposefully pulls away from the time-constricted demands of contemporary music consumption to offer a wide, open space where time moves differently and perceptions are readjusted, becoming malleable in the process. It’s not quick fix music, but when applied properly, the results endure."

-via Boomkat

More information can be found here.